


Half Day Closing

by ryma36rpm (katzenjammerd)



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 11:25:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17385593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katzenjammerd/pseuds/ryma36rpm
Summary: Someone contemplates her life with Dr. Freeride, courtesy of an encounter with Ms. Moss.`Inspired by' Colette's short story `L'autre femme'.





	Half Day Closing

_"…elle ne cessa plus de regarder avec une cuiosité envieuse la dame_   
_en blanc, cette mécontente, cette difficile, cette supérieure…"_

  
It was Mark who noticed her first. I had been too busy booking for a vacant table. I urged my way forward to sit in the sun.  
  
No, not there, go to the back." He's pulling me back, his head ducking down.  
  
"Why on earth…?" By this stage he's seated and is attempting to catch the waiter's eye.  
  
"Mark?" He turns his head to look at me, the menu still held high to attract our inattentive server, conveniently blocking his face from the rest of the cafe. "Who's here you don't like?" I'm keeping the tone light, but his face betrays everything. He *really* doesn't want this person to see us.  
  
"There's a girl at one of the front tables. An ex-girlfriend of mine, Donna.  
  
Oh. The Donna Who Must Not Be Talked About. I really want to see her. From where I'm seated, I can scan the tables easily. It takes ages to find her, surprisingly, as it's a relatively small café. Finally, my eyes come to rest on a blonde-haired woman sitting on her own by the window, her back up against the wall. I have an advantage here. I can see her, and she can't return the favour. She seems at first to be absorbed in a book, which I go to great pains to identify as `Letter To Daniel'. Her hair obscures her face, so I can't really get a good look at her. Fortunately, her eye is caught by a group of schoolchildren clattering past the café. The book is put to one side, as she rests her chin on her fists to stare at the people passing by. She is truly beautiful. Dressed simply, yet undeniably elegant. But that's not it. There must be something in the way the light falls on her face. It animates her. My stomach twists.  
  
This is not how I remember her. This is not how I remember her at all.  
  
She had come into the hospital looking for Mark. I thought she was a kid he had treated at first, but then again, she was probably still a teenager at the time, so I wasn't far off. At that stage, while Mark and I weren't together, we were fairly close. I was not exactly endeared to this pouty, giddy, childish-looking girl, and barely bothered to glance at her, as she leaned in over the reception to support herself as she mock tap-danced and clicked her heels  
together.  
  
I called her Dorothy privately after that.  
  
Dorothy, go click your heels together. Go back to Kansas and leave Mark to me.  
  
Looking back, this was probably the moment that solidified my resolve to get Mark. We suited each other, same age, same ambitions. I paid no attention to this silly girl, who was beneath my friend's notice. I forgot about her. She was easy to forget. He was easy to love,  
and it seems he found it easy to forget her too.  
  
"We'll both have coffee, black, and I might have toast, no wait, a Danish, and Elaine?" Mark is looking intently at me, as is our waitress, though she with less grace. A college dropout, paying her boyfriend's way through college, I think derisively, glancing over at my  inspiration. But there's hope for her yet, if her forerunner is anything to go by. I order a bran muffin – I'm trying to keep my weight down for our wedding.  
  
She still fiddles, but it's subtler. Dorothy can only be found in the click of her Italian leather shoe beating against her heel. My, but she has grown up. She looks older, not haggard or anything like that, but that she has gained experience and wisdom. There's a depth to her face that wasn't there before. I always thought of her as unfinished, a shallow little girl who clung to her doctor boyfriend. She's not a girl anymore. Whatever trial by fire she undergone, she's a woman now. There's a completeness to her, it's plain to see in her countenance She knows exactly where she is in her life, and it doesn't scare her or cause her to despair. God, I want to be like that. I smile at the irony of wishing to be girl I formerly disregarded, the woman that my fiancé cast aside for me.  
  
"It's rude to stare, you know." Mark interrupts my thoughts, looking deeply uncomfortable. Having, not one, but two fiancées in an enclosed area isn't exactly a new experience for him. When he was with her, he was always at pains to keep her well away from the trainee nurses, lest she discover his ex-fiancée. Why do you think it's taken him 6 years to get me anywhere near a jeweller's shop? I'm not recklessly silly, not like her. At least I think, not like her.  
  
"How did you break up, anyway? You never told me. Did she take the break up hard?" He glances away from me, when he looks back; he doesn't meet my eye. I've touched on a raw nerve, but just at this moment I need to know what was it about this girl he cheated on that hurts him so much. "Did she find out about us?"  
  
He looks up at me and laughs weakly, bitterly. "As she was walking out the door."  
  
Oh. His pride hurts because *she* left him, not because of what we did, just because she didn't want to be with him. I had never considered the possibility that she left him. It simply didn't occur to me that she might not dote on him, as I did, that she would walk away from such a serious investment in her life. I mean, she dropped out of college for him. Was she really as flighty as that? I glance over at her instinctively. She's gone back to her book, and seems to be taking notes. She certainly doesn't seem to be as capricious as Mark is leading me to believe.  
  
"What exactly happened, Mark? And please remember, we're to be joined in holy matrimony in less than a month, so I'd appreciate some honesty when you're telling your tale about the `girl who disappeared so what does it matter?' over there."  
  
He shrugs. "Nothing to tell. We thought we would be together. Two years in, it started to fall apart, she ended it first. She stopped lodging money in our account…" This I remember, he kept borrowing from me. I gave him the money, in the belief I could lure him away from Dorothy, who, now it seems, was clicking her heels to get her the hell away from Mark. Oh God, I'm such a fool. I fade back into his little speech. "…was for the best anyway, she was difficult to live with, one of these people who keeps balls of left-over string, and hordes of junk and trivia. Man, she could bore you to tears with her knowledge of arcane, useless information. She wanted too much from our relationship, she put too much strain on us. She expected me to hang off her every word." He turns around to look snatch a momentary glance at her. "She still looks like a handful, and surprise, surprise, she's alone. That's the trouble with women like her – they expect a relationship to fit this magical vision they have. That's what they want to be their reality. I mean, that's what she said, `us, we weren't the *real* thing'. What crap!"  
  
I'm begging God for him to choke on his Danish, or something. Anything. Simply anything that will quieten him for 10 milliseconds. Because it's all sliding into place. If he would shut up, even to take a breath, I'd tell him I always thought we were the `real thing'. I would tell him, she didn't want him to hang off her every word, just to respect what she was saying. She probably knew how we felt about her; the guys all though she was a pretty thing to play with; the girls though she was a dumb blonde drop-out, with her eyes on a doctor husband. She wanted more than Mark was willing to give, and when he couldn't give it to her, she plotted her escape from him, and the mistake she had made of planning her life around him. She escaped, and by the look of her, she had found the real thing, be it in her business or personal life, or, not out of the realm of possibility: both.  
  
It's a good thing I only had the muffin, my stomach hasn't stopped churning since I laid eyes on her.  
  
I keep thinking, `He loved her once, it couldn't hold her to him. He didn't love her enough to let her be herself'. I stare hard at her, watch her chat amicably with our waitress. The knots in my stomach tighten as I contemplate the idea that I've walked into the trap she fled all those years ago. *It's not the same- you and Mark knew you were meant to be together*  
  
"I *really* want to change the conversation now." Mark takes my hand, "She's all in the past, you're my future."  
  
There's a terrible taste of bile in the back of my mouth. God, I wish Mark had ordered some water.  
  
The thing is, when I was girl imagining what I would be like as an adult, I always imagined myself to be, well, like the woman I can't help staring at. At this moment in time, it seems Dorothy has managed to get to Kansas at last, and I am stuck her in Oz. She ran away from the Emerald City, I ran into its embrace.  
  
She's getting up to leave, and she throws a look in our direction, taking Mark in. I see the moment she recognises him, it's a split-second where she seems startled, quickly recovered. She smiles ruefully to herself and tosses her head, as if to shake off the bad memories. She steps out into the afternoon.  
  
It's hard to believe we're only halfway through this day. It feels like the whole day is coming to a close. I think nothing can happen after this.  
  
I gaze at my fiancé, whose head was turned away from her the whole time. I consider how he treated her, how I treated her. I think about a man who could think such things about person who so obviously loved him at some stage. She wanted to reach a little higher than he was willing to. I think about my future with a man like this, all the little bits of knowledge I built up about him. I created an image of him, and I don't think it bears any resemblance to him. The six years of learning, of hearing only his side of the story, has to be re-evaluated. She didn't disappear. She moved on, and left me in her place.


End file.
